This post is part of a retrospective on our trip to Easter Island for the Tapati Rapa Nui festival in February, 2004.

After our day seeing moai in various states of completion and decay, we spent a few leisurely mornings shopping in the town of Hanga Roa and visiting the Rapa Nui Museum. The town was in walking distance from our hotel, the Taha Tai Hotel, and featured some nice restaurants and shops. I enjoyed shopping on a quiet little street at the Mercado Artisanal, which featured handmade crafts of -- you guessed it, moai big and small.
The Mercado is actually an open air market with little grass tiki huts with various vendors selling key chains, magnets, statues big and small, and other goods. When we visited, it was a lazy day with not many tourists. The people working the stands were friendly and charming. They forgave my poor attempts at Spanish, and many of them spoke enough English to be able to barter and complete a sales transaction.
I met a woman from Connecticut at one of the key chain vendors, who told me that she came to this island every year for the past twenty years, and it was her favorite place on earth. The island is not that big, so there's not a huge variety of things to do, but I could certainly see getting attached to it and wanting to return. We go to Kauai every other year for the same reasons, but it's only a four hour flight from California. I admired her dedication in getting here every year, despite the travel.
The shops in the Mercado had a variety of wooden and stone moai to choose from, from tiny to about the size of Alexander. I wasn't sure how anyone would pack a 4 ft tall stone statuary in his or her luggage, but I guess they could ship it home to you at some exhorbitant rate. I opted for the ones that we could fit in our pockets or in the spare spaces in our suitcases, which were already pretty full from our trip to Iguazu Falls.